2024 Anime Boston AMV Contest Opening
Beginning with 2024, Anime Boston no longer had a designated theme, so I needed to come up with an idea for an opening without that prompt to start brainstorming from. The idea finally sprouted when I was talking to a friend of mine that goes to Otakon every year, and they complained about the contest opening always using the entire song of ELO's "Twilight" because they felt it was too long.
I decided I wanted to create an opening that I could reuse large parts of the framework of year-to-year, using an iconic song related to Boston. Finding the song was a pretty easy choice, as "Shipping Up to Boston" is used almost everywhere, and it also is a rocking song that definitely gets crowds excited. I found a really good instrumental version that I could cleanly shorten down to about a minute to avoid overstaying its welcome.
My primary idea was to take scenes from anime and juxtapose them against shots of landmarks from around the city. I spent a couple days running around the city shooting my own footage, since it was a lot easier to get the shots I wanted that way instead of trying to use stock footage libraries.
There are a couple of local and con in-jokes in the video, such as the pairing of the Isabella Gardner Museum (the site of a famous unsolved art heist) and Lupin. The first two shots are nods to the con's history, as Charlie's Kitchen was the restaurant the con's founders were in when they decided to start the con, and the Park Plaza was the con's home for the first two years before it moved to the Hynes.
It got a good reaction at the showing, and I also started including it as the opener to the awards show, as it only adds a minute to the run time, but sets up the showing better than jumping straight into the awards.
Video - Various Anime, Original footage
Audio - Dropkick Murphys - Shipping Up to Boston (instrumental)
Completed March 2024